Constructing a Witch

Despite the Devil being conceived to direct human baseness away from our goodly selves, there has always been sin in the world. The Bible has it that woman is the weaker vessel, therefore her inferior ways could easily let the Devil into the house, and into her oh so corruptible body – and thus the story begins. Helen Ivory’s new collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. The witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force. These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems of Constructing a Witch Helen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. With ten collage illustrations by Helen Ivory.

Table of Contents:
12   {By the slant of her tone}    13   The Waking    14   Some definitions of Witch    16   The lust of the goat is the bounty of God    17    Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast    18   Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?    19   Another Story    20   We are the weirdos mister    21   {daughters of air}    22   The Answer    23   Only Bad Witches Are Ugly    24   The Woman of Endor to Saul    25   Night Hag    26   One Such Tale    27   Scry    28   Day’s Conversation with Night    29   More thoughts about the dark    30   The Antihousewife    31   Dairying    32   {gnats, swarm upon swarm}    33   Remedy    34   How to Construct an Ale Witch    35   New Rules for the Disenchanted Land    36   Cackle    37   The Gift    38   Fetish to Counteract Witchcraft    39   {and thus the riddle has been read}    40   The Moon’s Halo    41   Protection Ink    42   At the Witchcraft Museum    43   Hexentanz    44   Häxan    45   The Original Bad Girl    46   To a Painter    47   All about the hair    48   More thoughts about the body    49   {a cluster of pretty berries}    50   Margaret Johnson    51   Elizabeth Tibbots    52   Lilias Adie (c. 1640-1704)    53   Walking the Witch    54   The Devil’s Mark    55   More thoughts about the Witch Finder    56   {Shall the boys come and hang, burn or roast you?}    57   Pendle Tourist    58   Bridget Bishop    59   The Good People of Salem    60   Samuel Parris Dreams of Dogs    61   The Makings    62   Witchfinder Tour    63   Mistley Pond Washes its Hands    65   {familiar spirits]    66   More thoughts about the moon    67   Prick    68   Resistance Spells    68      Spell to Take Back the Night    69      Summoning Spell: The Body    70      Disarming Spell: The Enchanter    71   {The church-bells began to ring}    72   ‘Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen’    73   The Watcher    74   The Happenings    77   Hang the Moon    78   The Menstruous Woman    79   Brain Fog    80   The Change    81   ‘Invidia’ (‘Envy’)    82   {shortly after midnight}    83   Tick-Tock    84   Thirteen Million    85   This whole thing was nearly never a thing    86   34 Symptoms of the Menopause    88   Votive    89   ‘The Spirit of the Storm’    90   {fire as fire}    93   Acknowledgements    95   About the collage/poems

About the Author :
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and teaches for UEA/National Centre for Writing online. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010), Waiting for Bluebeard (2013), The Anatomical Venus (2019), and Constructing a Witch (2024), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A book of collage/mixed media poems, Hear What the Moon Told Me, was published KFS in 2017, a chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City, by SurVision in 2019, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat in the US in 2023. The Anatomical Venus was shortlisted for the poetry category of the East Anglian Book Awards 2019. The cover of The Anatomical Venus, which features her own artwork, won the East Anglian Writers Book by the Cover Award (East Anglian Book Awards 2019). Her work has been translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. She lives in Norwich.

Review :
Ivory not only calls attention to the historical practices that have been used to subjugate women, she also reminds us of the process of double-vision: here is an entire collection written in an ironic double-vision, a female writing the female through the male historical gaze. The result is nothing less than what Shuttle describes as “a strong explosion in the sky. The Anatomical Venus is an often disturbing journey of how women have been treated by men through the ages. It is historical reportage. It is controlled and focused anger without sentiment. It is subjugation and oppression laid bare in subtle and often mesmerising ways. It is Angela Carter’s eye meets Elaine Showalter’s brain. It is dark, upsetting and erotic. And it’s laced with magic from the first page until the last. It’s the suffering of women, and women fighting back in delicious and unusual ways. It says as much, if not more, about men throughout history as it does about women. Read this book. Then read it again. And again. With each reading, The Anatomical Venus will reveal something new, like all great books do. Historical it may well be but this collection’s contemporary relevance is searing… This collection is a stunningly curated linguistic exhibition on the historical abuse of women. Enticing and yet flinching, this disquieting house of dolls makes abuse seen and urges us to reevaluate why women are where they are now, and it does so with an eerie and unforgettable beauty.